The country kid knew his mother was a soft touch, particularly when she was running late for work. As she finished her make-up in the bathroom, young Sam poked his head around the door with a classic try-on: "Mum, can I have one of my Easter eggs?"

His timing was nearly perfect. He knew that once the family's 69-year-old babysitter arrived, the suggestion of a pre-breakfast treat would be dismissed with a cold stare. It was too early in the day and too late in the process to debate nutrition with a determined six-year-old. So Mary Suratman, who was due to start her 7am shift as acting charge nurse at a nearby hospital, gave in with a nod of her head.

But before her son could reach the fridge, Lois, the no-nonsense babysitter, walked in via the back door. What Lois didn't know was she was being silently stalked by an opportunistic bag thief who specialised in targeting older women in the Victorian country town of Shepparton. Lois, a notoriously slow driver, would have stood out as an easy mark on the near-deserted roads that morning.

The man who walked into the carefully renovated country cottage usually relied on surprise and speed and would have planned to be gone in seconds. That is, until he saw Mary and her son.

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It was 6.45am, April 7, 1993. The sliding door moment when a handbag thief made his move would change this family forever and be the genesis of a legal case that would take two generations of police nearly 20 years to resolve.

At first, Mary could hardly take the intruder seriously. He looked more silly than sinister with a tea towel draped around his face, a calico cloth covering his hair and colourful, almost circus-style pants tucked into his socks.

That was until he lifted Sam off the ground, placed him in a headlock and put a knife to his throat, saying, "Do as you are told or he will get hurt. I will slit his throat.''

When her son started to cry, the nervous and angry assailant muttered, "Shut him up or he'll get hurt."

Under stress, we often revert to what we know best, and Mary, then 37, let her nursing training override her rising panic. Years of working in a psycho-geriatric ward had left her with the skill to negotiate with erratic patients and she knew an emotional response would only prove inflammatory. Calmly, she asked the masked man to put the boy down. "I deliberately didn't use his name. I didn't want him to know he was my son."

Caught: Neville Mansfield.

But when her 11-year-old daughter, Zoe, wandered into the kitchen, it was the end of negotiations as he screamed, "Get her out." Muffy, the family's Maltese terrier, scampered in and began barking at the stranger while both kids sobbed from a combination of fear and shock. When the stranger demanded money, Lois emptied her purse, which contained just a few coins, while Mary hoped the $200 in cash in her wallet would placate him. It didn't.

He began to ask questions, establishing that Mary had separated from her husband 12 months earlier and no visitors were expected any time soon. He relaxed slightly and even released young Sam, deciding there was no longer any reason to rush.

The four hostages were led to the main bedroom, ordered to sit, then bound with stockings. When he began to roughly stuff makeshift gags down their throats, Zoe, who battled sinusitis, started to splutter, "I can't breathe, I can't breathe."

"I was scared stiff that she'd suffocate," Mary would later tell police.

There was only one faint chance that they might be saved. Hospitals run on small staff and strict shifts, so when Mary wasn't on the ward by the stroke of 7am, she was immediately missed.

Just 10 minutes later, a night-shift nurse at the Mooroopna Extended Care Centre, anxious to knock off, rang to enquire about the delay. The intruder ordered Mary at knife-point to claim she had car trouble and would be at least an hour late. Begrudgingly, the staff member accepted the excuse and rang off.

Perhaps that was the moment the man with the knife decided to become a rapist, knowing now he had plenty of time on his hands. Hooded, gagged and with her hands tied behind her back, Mary was led towards the kitchen. The intruder helped himself to food, then opened a bottle of wine and poured two glasses. It was about 7.20am. Whether he was playing out a fantasy that the terrified woman on the floor was his date or whether he wanted to give the impression there was more than one offender will never be known.

Even now, all these years later, Mary can't forget the noise. The sound of the buttons from her purple cardigan clattering on the freshly polished timber floor as he sliced them off, one by one, to show the knife was scalpel-sharp. Knowing she was about to be raped, Mary began to sob, begging, "Please don't do this."

He responded, "Shut up, or would you rather have your throat slit?"

He cut her clothes off, then to prove his point ran the end of the blade across her throat and stomach, saying, "Feel how sharp it is, I could kill you with this."

Throughout the attack, he kept telling her that if she fought, they were all dead. "I was convinced I was going to die," she says. "I no longer felt human, but like a chunk of meat."

As she lay there, she believed it would all end at the point of the blade. "I wondered how much the knife would hurt and felt so sorry to think that my kids would be left to discover the half-naked body of their mother." A thought flashed through her mind - "Thank God I've upgraded my life insurance."

After the attack, he poured fluid over her and around the room. For a moment she thought it was petrol and they were to be burned alive. Then a stinging sensation in her eyes told her it was soap and water. He used a face washer to clean her body and then washed the floor in a bid to remove all possible clues. But DNA and determined detectives can be stubborn, although it would take years of scientific refinements to identify the man with the knife.

Not content with controlling her body, he wanted to invade her mind, whispering in her ear: "You are very lucky that I didn't slit all your throats and cut your dog's head off. You are not to tell anyone or I will come back with friends and kill you and get a kick out if it. Now swear on your kids that you won't tell anybody."

Mary promised to keep his dirty secret. "I was too scared to say anything else, even though in my mind I was thinking, 'Like hell I will.' "

As soon as the house fell silent, she freed herself and tried to ring the police but there was no dial tone. He had cut the line.

After freeing the children and the babysitter, she unlocked the front door. "We all then stood there like we were frozen to the spot and just watched the kids walk past on their way to school."

Zoe was the first to snap into action, heading to a neighbour's house to ring police while Lois wanted all of them to remain silent, "Because he will come back and shoot us."

The police sirens minutes later marked the end of the crime and the beginning of something worse. After a medical examination, a tiny fragment of foreign DNA was identified, bagged and filed. Over the years, its existence was virtually forgotten as new cases took priority.

Less than 12 hours after the attack, Mary told police, "This man has ruined my life and my kids' [lives] forever."

Victims of sexual assault are not named. Violated once, they are entitled to anonymity. But in a country centre like Shepparton, there are few secrets and plenty of small-town gossip, which means Mary was never given the chance to grieve in private. You can get lost in a crowd, but not in the main street of Shepparton.

Mary had worked with one of the members of the medical team who examined her straight after the rape. She was given a sick-leave certificate for two days and the morning-after pill.

As a single mother, she had chosen the worst house in the best street and spent a year renovating the tiny weatherboard cottage, picking through demolition sites to stay within her tight budget. The home she had built as a safe haven was now a permanent reminder of her vulnerability. Every time she walked into the kitchen, it felt like a crime scene; her bedroom had been her children's prison. And there was the fingerprint powder, which "gets into the walls and stays there for years".

The house was in a quiet street but soon Mary found local cars cruising slowly by with people pointing. Her family, their home and her very identity were now defined by a random crime. "We were so proud of that house, it contained our hopes and dreams but, afterwards, it had this sense of evil. I didn't want to go back."

But she had no choice. "The real-estate agent said we'd done a lovely job but he would never be able to sell it." (She did, four years later.)

Mary felt - real or imagined - that people in the street were looking at her strangely. "I went to the bank a week later and a teller I didn't know said he was really sorry to hear what had happened."

In the supermarket, a work colleague couldn't wait to say her local police officer son had filled her in on the supposedly confidential investigation. "She said she knew what had happened, then she winked and said, 'Well, you are a bit of alright, you know.' I left my supermarket trolley there and walked out. I felt sick."

For years she would look at strangers in the street and wonder, "Is he the one?"

It is not only selected juries but communities that can pass judgment. And if the victim is seen to have somehow contributed to his or her plight, then the rest of us feel a little safer. Soon Mary heard the most popular theory: desperate and dateless, she had picked up a guy in a nightclub who had raped her in the morning. "So many people seemed to believe I had done something to deserve this," says Mary.

What really floored her, though, was when the babysitter rang to repeat the story. "I said, 'You should know I don't go to nightclubs. Have I ever brought a man back here?' "

Straight after the rape, she was just relieved to be alive but, when depression set in, she at times wondered whether it would have been better if her life had ended on her wooden floor.

Seven months later in November, still numb, sleep-deprived and depressed, she went on a trip to the Gold Coast, had a holiday romance and fell pregnant.

She was struggling to care for herself and her kids, let alone a newborn, so well-meaning friends suggested she have an abortion. She ignored their advice and gave birth to a baby boy, Caleb, who is now nearly 20. His arrival was, she says, a blessing; he gave her a reason to get out of bed every morning.

In Melbourne, then Detective Sergeant Terry Kane of the Rape Squad was on duty that morning when the call came in of a serious sex attack by an unknown offender in Shepparton. It became his case. In the early days of DNA analysis, suspects were asked to provide a blood sample for examination, but none in this case proved positive.

With a population then of 10,000, Shepparton, 180 kilometres north of Melbourne, has long been used to drifters. The centre of a stone-fruit industry, the town's population frequently swelled with seasonal pickers.

Kane and his team checked local canneries but had little to go on. They checked more than 150 suspect cars and local sex offenders, but still there was nothing. The offender's disguise meant they were looking for someone of medium height and build with brown eyes. And he could be a local or someone long gone.

In fact, the offender was a local burglar who carefully disguised his voice and asked Mary a series of questions designed to leave the impression he was from out of town.

As Kane and his team interviewed suspects, a local policeman investigating a series of burglaries identified heavy-drug user Neville Mansfield as the most likely suspect in the robberies. Acting as a heavy-handed sheriff, he ordered Mansfield to leave town or cop a beating. He failed to tell rape-squad detectives the man was of medium height with brown eyes and an obvious person of interest.

Pregnant and battling to recover, Mary was hopeful police would one day ring with news. But when the call came almost 12 months after the attack, it was not what she had hoped for. There was nowhere to go and the case was being closed.

She had counselling, but there could never be any resolution with the knowledge her attacker was out there. For more than 15 years, she stopped talking about the crime, trying to suppress her fear and anger. "I really envied victims who knew [the identity of their attackers]," she says. And she couldn't confide her feelings to her children, because she hadn't told them what had happened while they were bound in the bedroom.

And on the shelf was where the case stayed until a detective with too much energy and not enough casework found himself at the Sexual Crimes Squad. To fill in time, Senior Detective David Quirk asked if he could work on a cold case. There were 12 boxes in the office - each containing files on an unsolved rape. He took the Shepparton one.

In 2009, he found that much of the case's evidence had been destroyed, although three cotton bud swabs remained. Two were found to be useless, so the final one was used to run through the national DNA database. Scientific refinements over the years meant the system was more sensitive and finally there was a match to an opportunistic burglar last convicted in Queensland - with relatives in Shepparton.

Quirk hunted down records, which showed that at the time of the rape Neville Mansfield, then 31, was reporting in the town on a Community Based Order, was registered to a local address for Centrelink payments, had been picking fruit nearby and moved to Queensland less than two weeks after the crime. Mansfield had a long but unremarkable criminal record, convicted 17 times in eight court visits for burglary and theft.

Eventually, Quirk contacted Mary and, over chamomile tea, told her he had taken over the case and there was a DNA breakthrough. "If she hadn't wanted the matter to proceed, it would have ended there, but she was very determined," Quirk says. "She said, 'I never doubted this day would come.' She is a woman of remarkable strength."

On August 24, 2009, Quirk knocked on a door in another Victorian town - this time in Bairnsdale. More than 16 years after he'd snuck in through the back door of Mary's house, police walked in through a front door to arrest Mansfield. "He had this cold stare, as if wondering what we had on him," Quirk says. He was charged with multiple offences, including rape, threats to kill, aggravated burglary and false imprisonment.

He stared blankly forward as the jury returned to the County Court in 2012. Mary recalls that as they found him guilty of 16 offences, he reacted as if he had been slapped across the face. Last year, after a failed appeal, he was sentenced to 14 years, with a minimum of 11.

Mary's children were in the court every day to support their mother. Sam remembers every detail of what happened to him that morning. It left him with terrible night terrors and anger that lasted years. To the boy, the intruder was "a horrible monster", but when he finally saw Mansfield "he was nothing more than a low life".

There is well-meaning talk of a guilty verdict providing closure. Mary says it doesn't, but it beats not knowing. "I think only losing a child could be worse than rape," she says. "You learn to live with it, but you never truly get over it."

As they left the court nearly 20 years after they first met, Mary turned to Terry Kane and said, "Now I can tell my story."